Napster was great for getting MP3 music. Those were the type of media file regularly traded. You could download gigs upon gigs of tunes quickly and easily. The peer-to-peer (P2P) technology also made this type of downloading pretty fast. But as usual, The Man put a subtle stop to this open bar of rock-n-roll.
We shoot ahead a few years and Bit Torrent P2P file swapping is the all the rage. Bit Torrent is really fast but it has its downsides, namely that only popular media will be able to be found and downloaded quickly.
I recently took another stab at Bit Torrent with eXeem, a Kazaa-like interface for P2P file swapping. I put in a search for a favorite rock band and got back quite a few results. See the results come in made me smile, thinking the glory days were back, but upon closer examination it was merely a smoke screen.
None of the search results were music. They were music videos, bootleg collects, movies, commercials, videogames, and more. There are lots of people out there that live and die for videos and bootlegs, which is fine, but I’m not one of these people. I want studio music from my favorite artists. I’m not looking for the live performance from ’84 at Madison Square Garden.
My point is that now it’s easy to get various media but hard to find any single one. Searching for “audio only” doesn’t prove to work (regardless of interface) and then you only get the songs that people are currently trading - the con of Bit Torrent. So if you’re looking for anything that’s not hot and popular, you’re probably out of luck. And with the current music scene no one will be downloading new music. (Think about that music industry!)
There needs to be freewheeling trading with Bit Torrent but with a niche focus. Someone needs to make a search interface that looks only for music or only movies. If that’s hard, then the organizing and data indexing of Bit Torrent needs to be rethunk.
The files are out there but we can’t get to them because of the “greatness” that is open season on all things. The technology is great, there’s not doubt about that, but it needs to be refined to be of real value and have the Napster-effect make a comeback.
Bit Torrent wasn’t created for music and movie trading. It is already a niche product.
It was created out of the need for a company to release software without overloading it’s FTP server. For instance, The next ISO release of your favorite linux distro comes out today. Instead of waiting for painfully slow FTP donwloads, everyone chips in and everyone gets their ISO in a timely manner. They know it’s going to be a high demand download, so they put it out via bit-torrent instead of on the FTP server.
Personally, I’d like to see bit-torrent left out of the illegal downloads arena. It’s great software, and the author did not create it to be used as such. The next thing we know, the RIAA will shut the poor guy down, and a very usefull tool will cease to exist.
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If it started as a niche product then they’ve out grown it.
Any sort of big downloads now seem to be Bit Torrent, whether it’s music, movies, games, or anything else.
Any file-swapping system is “intended” for legit purposes, and each has legit purposes. Napster/Kazaa was legit for independent artists that just need to get their music heard. Or you could set it up to share specific files between certain people.
If the developers keep making these P2P apps open source and available, then they will always end up being used for illegal swapping. I’m not an anti-open source person, but I think they knew what they had when they were making Torrent and maybe should have known better.
Nevertheless, Torrent and the new Kazaa’s are scoping out all media, both legal and illegal. My argument is that you can’t find one form anymore because these software packages are being developed with looking for everything in mind.
“I think they knew what they had when they were making Torrent”
Bram Cohen is the creator of Bit Torrent. It wasn’t created by a “they”. I believe he has some help now, but for a long time, it was just him. He created it to aid in software releases. He had no intention of creating a way for people to steal music or movies.
Bit Torrent has been around for quite some time now, but has only been brought to light because it was discoverd by all the pirates after they lost out on their other vehicles for media theft.
There is a reason that BT doesn’t have any sort of search capibility built into it. It’s made for a software company to put a torrent link on their site. It was not made to search for and download music, videos, or warez.
http://www.bittorrent.com/introduction.html
It is a niche product. It has not outgrown it’s niche, it’s just being exploited for purposes never intended.
G+
My point was that he should have expected it to be exploited if he makes it free for everyone.
If you make a tank and give everyone the keys, you should expect someone to go blow up something they shouldn’t. If you keep the keys to yourself (or only to a limited few) then you’re a little safer in knowing what your tank will be used for.
I’m not saying how you protect those keys, I’m just saying they need to be protected. Now if you give the keys to someone and they in turn make copies and give it to everyone for free, that’s a different story - but at that point it’s not the originator’s fault anyway, at least to some extent.
Plus…I realize that BT is the delivery system, but the people that make front ends like eXeem (the exploiters) need to start making limited interfaces that focus on only specific media types.
I guess I’m not attacking BT, I’m attacking the exploiters of BT that haven’t figured out how to manipulate it yet. I’m impatient.
Oh, OK… that’s totally different. I’ll agree there… the exploiters need to make a better product. :O)
HEHE…
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